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Then
May 9, 1911:
The state's first known airplane (named Tingmayuk, or "bird") fails its maiden flight, never getting off the ground despite a downhill runway.
Now
2007:
With a plane behind every bush, Alaska has over three times as many licensed pilots as any other state.
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In May 1956, conservationists Olaus and Margaret ("Mardy") Murie set off on a four-month expedition to the Sheenjek River. The film of their trip, Letter From the Brooks Range, became a stirring, sentimental call for the creation of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Fifty-one years later, with 1.5 million acres (about 600 thousand hectares) of the refuge's coastal plain still embattled by proposed oil and gas drilling, a question in the film echoes hauntingly: "Will we have the wisdom to cherish such places? To leave such parts of the Earth in their natural state, humbly and with appreciation?" The refuge is still waiting for an answer.
The Alaska Moment:
Alaska Range | ANWR | Glacier Bay | Tongass | Yukon | All Alaska Trips
New Frontier
Collecting First Descents
Tired of what he calls the "broadband-drive-through-espresso-style trips" offered by many wilderness outfitters, longtime Alaska guide Macgill Adams of Wilderness Alaska suggests something different: pack rafts. The light, tough
one-person rafts, now available through companies such as Alpacka Raft (www.alpackaraft.com), will "open up the land, the mind, the whole idea of the refuge," he says. Adams is planning to offer small-group expeditions ($3,000 for ten days, no white-water experience needed; www.wildernessalaska.com) that use "the ultimate waterborne bumper cars" to access some of the most remote tributaries in the refuge—streams without names or volume enough to float traditional rafts, but with a whole lot of unexplored wilderness on their banks.
Need to Know: "Exsanguination" is a fancy word for having all of your blood drained. To avoid it, bring mosquito shirts ($58; www.bugshirt.com), camp on windy terrain or near snowfields, and swat as necessary.
Classic
Finding a World Gone Silent
When the din of your bush plane finally fades from the Sheenjek River Valley, the silence flows back in like water over a stone dropped into an Arctic pond. With no roads and not a single maintained trail, bush planes are the only way into the Sheenjek, which flows 200 miles (322 kilometers) through the heart of the Arctic Refuge. At 19.6 million acres (7.9 million hectares), the refuge is huge: Nearly ten Yellowstones would fit in its borders. Such immensity swats away any modern obsession with expediency. A ten-day July trip with Equinox Wilderness Expeditions ($3,495; www.equinoxexpeditions.com) includes hiking trailless tundra to the grassy shores of Last Lake, a spot Mardy Murie called her "place of enchantment," and floating the Sheenjek, where slow waters afford a chance to kick back and watch peaks float by like clouds.
The Alaska Moment:
Alaska Range | ANWR | Glacier Bay | Tongass | Yukon | All Alaska Trips
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